A reader writes:
Do you even have a category for dissents of dissents? In any case, I'm a southern man. Like another dissenter, I've loved and hated the South in predictable cycles and spent much of the last decade elsewhere. Now I'm home to stay in Louisiana. When I read the comments on the Southern, "planter class," I was infuriated. Whoever wrote that was a smug, narrow-minded jingoist in their own right, conveniently ignoring facts of history like the wholesale lynching of emancipated slaves during the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, the racism at the heart of the Detroit Riots a century later, and the on-going hyper-segregation of many Northern cities.
That being said … those words hit me right in the gut.
There are reasons why, since President Obama's election, I've celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas exclusively with my wife's Northern family. And, I need to admit to myself that I've been avoiding certain relatives and friends for fear of being drawn into a political argument. We Southerners who don't fit the reader's hateful categorization (the vast, vast majority) need to start actively confronting the bigotry of our friends and family when they try to hide behind words like, "radical," "terrorist," and "Muslim."
Another writes:
The letter was describing the Tea Party as representative of "the rump south". Which they are. To be clear, I found these definitions of what it is to be "the rump" courtesy of the Free Dictionary (the first one I grabbed in a google):
5. The last or inferior part.
6. A legislature having only a small part of its original membership and therefore being unrepresentative or lacking in authority.The reader was not describing the entire South. He/she was referring to the last and definitely the inferior part, which are, as definition 6 there phrases it "a small part of the original" and "therefore unrepresentative". And that small inferior part of the Republican party comprised of an unrepresentative part of the south as a whole is indeed the rump. The rear end.
Another:
I've read you for years going back but never felt compelled to write in before reading these dissents, particularly the second one. Never does the reader to whom he or she was responding say that all Southerners fit the mold he described. Yet the dissenter immediately takes it personally and describes the attack as being on "all of us." A state, nation, or group can rightly be described in terms of the majority of its members with the understanding that each individual is different. To say the the South is the rump of the Republican Party is not to say a Southerner is a Republican.
The first reader is factually correct that a very large voting bloc in the South has voted along racial lines since our nation's founding. The core of the Tea Party today is the children of the people who enforced Jim Crow and owned slaves. To ignore where they're coming from is to ignore who they are. Not all or most Southerners are racist and not all racists are Southern. But without that core, the Republican Party simply does not have the political power that it has today. The Republican "coalition" (if any diversity of ideas among its members exists at all anymore) is built on the back of this rump. The GOP cannot exist without the type of people your first reader described and that is a big factor in why they've drifted so far right.
Another thing: When was the last time you heard a prominent Democrat claiming the South wasn't "real America"? The idea that coastal and urban voters are illegitimate and harmful to America is practically the official stance of the GOP. People like your dissenting reader of course shouldn't feel guilty about things they've never done wrong, but they could use a thicker skin when people point out the worst habits of their neighbors. Imagine if every Northern reader threw a tantrum like that every time we were described as Un-American.
The Dish 